HABERMAN (pgh 1): Al Gore may have been the popular-vote winner of the 2000 presidential election, but among the many things he couldnt get right that year was his wardrobe. Searching for his inner alpha male, he kept bouncing around, from casual earth tones to dark business suits.

Good God! Today, Haberman takes the leadership role as the Times Intelligence Quotient continues its search for the bottom. David Halbfinger talks about Botox. David Brooks prices Kerrys shirts. Elisabeth Bumiller limns Bushs bedtime. And Haberman? He again recites the earth tones bullroar! As weve told you: If they didnt exist, you could never invent them. There is no way to dream this group up.

No, readers, Candidate Gore didnt keep bouncing around from casual earth tones to dark business suits. At least, he didnt do so any more than any other modern candidate does; you may have noticed that this years hopefuls wore different clothes for different events (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 9/11/02). And no, there was never any evidence that Naomi Wolf told Gore to wear earth tones, or that she headed some strange attempt to make him an alpha male. Those tales were made up, by your press corps. Why would they do such a puzzling thing? They were conducting a War Against Gore.

For the full story of the tones, we provide a link below. But the hapless people who make up your press corps display an array of odd behaviors. One of their primary traits is this: Once they invent a pleasing tale, they never stop repeating it. Weird, isnt it? Theyre prime savants at remembering odd spinbut almost incapable of discerning real facts! All together now, in your best rain man accentpretend that youre the hapless Haberman: Earth tones, yeah, yeahdefinitely earth tones. But incredibly, scribes of this caliber are now in charge of the most important public discourse in the world.

But readers, Habermans column is Straight Outa Mensa compared to Donald Lambros report. Your Washington press corps is deeply dysfunctional; yesterday, Lambro worked to prove it. In no other profession could a well-known player dare to behave as Lambro did. But other professions have standards and oversight; your Washington press corps clowns in your face. Yes, well name a long list of names. To see their broken culture, keep reading.

LAMBRO LIES IN YOUR FACE: How corrupt is your Washington press corps? At the Washington Times, the gang is currently stirring a flap about that troubling thing Kerry said. According to Kerry, foreign leaders have said they hope that hell defeat Bush; since Kerry wont reveal who these leaders are, the Bush campaign (and of course, the Times) is trying to build a big flap. So there was Lambros front-page report in yesterdays Times. Like some before him, Kerry snared by large boasts, the tangy headline said.

And yes, the scribe was soon pushing a time-honored theme: Kerrys a Big Liar, just like Al Gore. Lambro offered troubling examples of past phony things major Democrats said. Gore, of course, was the scribes poster-child. But who was lying? Duh! Not Gore! Heres how Lambro began his string of deceptions:

(10) Al Gore said during the 2000 campaign that he had played the lead role in creating the Internet.

Say what? Readers may notice a striking factthat quotation from Gore is simply made up! (Well, in fairness, Gore did say the word the as part of his comment about the Internet.) Lambro uses quotation marks, pretending to quote something Gore really said. But Gore did not say that he played the lead role; that quote is a pure Donald Lambro invention. But then, the clowning tale of Gore and the Net was a press corps invention from start to end. Four years later, Lambro embellishes the tale even further, ginning up a new phony quote that has never been used in the past. (For a link on this topic, see below.)

But then, Lambro is a consummate fraud, as weve frequently noted. He relentlessly lies to readers of the Times, who love to be treated like rubes. How dishonest is Donald Lambro? Amazingly, as he typed along, he served up these old, crackpot howlers:

LAMBRO (11): On another occasion he described how his father, the late Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee, taught me to clean out hog waste with a shovel and how to clear land with a two-bladed ax.

(12) He taught me how to plow a steep hillside with a team of mules. He taught me how to take up hay all day long in the hot sun.

(13) Mr. Gore grew up in Washington, where the family lived in the Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row, and attended exclusive private schools and Harvard University.

In this passage, Lambro revives another slander from Campaign 2000a slander which was so total a hoax that even your press corps dropped it. Is it true? Did Gores father make his son work on the familys Tennessee farm? During Campaign 2000, every biographer described this part of Gores life, and it was widely discussed in newspaper profiles. As early as March 1999, for example, Bob Zelnick published his Gore bio for Regnery, the well-known conservative publisher. But Zelnick made the farm chores the central metaphor of Gores life, closing his book with a final image of Gore plowing the family farms dangerous hillsides (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 3/25/99; more links below). And in early 2000, Bill Turque published Inventing Al Gore; it became the definitive Gore bio. Heres how Turque described Gores childhood summers. His description was never disputed:

TURQUE: While many of Little Als classmates were packed off to summer camp when school let out, he headed for the familys eight-hundred-acre tobacco and cattle farm about two and a half miles east of Carthage, Tennessee. The trips were less vacations than character-building boot camps designed by Albert Gore [Sr.] to give his privilege-softened son a taste of his own struggles in Possum Hollow. Ironically, Al Gores Republican antagonists have seized on his recollections of the hard work he did on the farm as another bogus tale about his life. In fact, Gore was up at dawn tending to livestock and hosing out hog parlors.

Comical, isnt it? Four years later, Gores Republican antagonists continue to lie in the publics face about these events, hoping to use them to tarnish Kerry! By the way, how tough were those chores? Turque just kept on describin:

TURQUE: For parts of virtually every summer through high school, Gore worked with the farmhands and was often assigned an extra project assigned by his father...Even the local kids, who might have enjoyed watching a city slicker sweat some, were appalled at how hard Gore was worked. It was horrendous, said one woman who knew him well as a teenager.

As the campaign continued, a string of profiles in major publications described this well-known part of Gores life. Only the hardest liars of the hardest-lying right kept repeating the bogus tales which had flourished during the early campaign. But four years later, there is Lambro, typing the fake, phony tales once againand using them to help readers see that Kerry and Gore are both Big Liars! Meanwhile, dont thinkfor a minutethat Donald Lambro doesnt know the facts of this case. Lambro is a paid public liar. This week, hes trying to corrupt another important White House race.

In yesterdays column, Lambro was hardly finished when he recited these old, bogus tales. For example, he repeated a hoary old (bogus) tale about Gores 1996 convention speech, and he recited a phony claim about Clinton and those Arkansas church burnings. But rememberLambro is a paid public liar. And heres the key point, which you must understand: No one else in Lambros profession will ever say one word about him.

Question: In any other American profession, could a well-known figure like Lambro lie in public like this? Its really quite hard to imagine. But thats because members of other professions maintain lists of professional standards, and are inclined to police their professions. But there are no standards in your press corps, and no Big Pundit will even say Boo when a man like Lambro lies through his teeth. Indeed, thats how the bogus tales about Gore ended up deciding the 2000 race. People like Lambro lied, and lied. And lazy cowards in your press corps kept silent.

Who said nothing, four years ago? Lets name a few of the quiet people who dont hear the voices the rest of us hear:

And oh yes, The American Prospect said nothing. In fact, some of these people did less than say nothing; some repeated the fake tales themselves! And yes, George Bush is in the White House because of what these people did.

Yesterday, Lambro conducted his latest offense against your American democracy. Again, theyre trying to gin your election. But make no mistake. Your major journalists are very well paid. They seem to enjoy their luxury postings. They worry about what happened in Spainbut couldnt care less about your election. Could Donald Lambro behave this way in any other American profession? Probably not. But he and his corrupted colleagues are going to lie in your faces again, and an obvious question has now been joined: Will Dionne, Shields and Hunt dare confront it?

TOMORROW: Theyre crooks and liars, Kerry said. Gee! Do you have any idea who he could have meant? Tomorrow, we return to this weeks scheduled topicand well emit low chuckles as pundits play dumb over Kerrys very strange, puzzling comment.

VISIT OUR INCOMPARABLE ARCHIVES: Democrats needs to understand the way their party lost the White House: